Run the Experiment

A few years ago I built a system to create social networks by mining online conversations. The idea was that from these networks I could determine (amongst other things) who was talking about a particular topic, and the relative influence of each speaker.

I've been interested in the science of social networks ever since, and so I've really enjoyed re-acquainting myself with the theory and practice of networks during Lada Adamic's excellent Social Network Analysis course.

Then a few weeks back, a question about the practical application of social networks appeared in my Quora feed: "How did Google's creators realise the PageRank algorithm would be a useful indicator of good search results?"

It's a good question, because it goes back to the dawn of the information age, when pioneering thinkers had begun to contemplate how to make sense of the massive amount of knowledge that would inevitably become accessible. Vannevar Bush's classic article As We May Think suggested using a citation index to find influential information. Then in the 50s, Eugene Garfield developed the idea of impact factors, using citations to empirically calculate the influence of academic papers.

But citation analysis is not trivial to calculate, especially if the documents in question don't even have an index, and are literally dispersed across the globe. So the first internet search engines simply counted keywords; it was the pragmatic thing to do.

• One in 100 million: how do you find what you're looking for? (with metaphor by Ai Weiwei)

It turns out finding things is hard, especially when there's a lot to sift through. And so here begins the fascinating story of the PageRank algorithm - and Google - the company formed to exploit it, which is nicely told in the first few chapters of John Battelle's book, The Search.

It began with a brave, complicated, highly ambitious experiment:

"In graduate school at Stanford University, I had about ten different ideas of things I wanted to do, and one of them was to look at the link structure of the web. My advisor, Terry Winograd, picked that one out and said, 'Well, that one seems like a really good idea.' So I give him credit for that." -- Larry Page

So whilst the idea of citation analysis wasn't new, what was novel was the ambition of applying it to the whole worldwide web, which by 1996 was at least 10 million documents, and growing rapidly.

In Battelle's book Terry Winograd recollects that what he didn't say when recommending the topic to Larry Page was that he thought the task was impossible in practice. But knowing when to hold your peace, and trust your student to explore the topic without prejudice, is the hallmark of a great mentor.

And Winograd was right not to dampen Page's enthusiasm, because once you start trying to implement citation analysis on a graph as gigantic as the web you're forced to confront all sorts of challenges.

For instance: one non-trivial problem is the graph you're trying to analyse is enormous, far beyond what would fit into the memory of even the largest supercomputer. And Page and Brin were grad students without budgets at the time, they would have to make do with desktops they could beg and borrow.

But necessity is the mother of invention, and the constraints of their available computing resources became the impetus behind their solution. They would split the graph into smaller individually computable fragments. They would distribute each fragment to one of their processors, analyse it, collect the results centrally, and integrate them into an index.

As well as technical challenges, there were theoretical ones. For example, by nature citations form a directed graph, and because of the way websites are interlinked, it's easy for any analysis algorithm to get stuck in a closed loop.  Page's solution was to introduce the concept of the 'Random Surfer', who'd visit a portion of a graph, explore it to build up a local picture of what's important, and then get bored after several clicks and switch to a random page in a completely new region of the network.

This approach to computing citation analysis using a divide and conquer approach was novel, because no-one had ever had the means or the motivation to analyse such a massive network. The breakthrough was making the problem tractable, creating an infrastructure and algorithm that allowed the network to be explored and understood in small fragments. This allowed the seemingly overwhelming challenge of analysing the web to be divided up. Then Page and Brin built a search engine called BackRub to utilise the new PageRank index, and by doing so were able to prove it would scale: the more they processed, the better their results.

Returning to the original question; when did they realize the PageRank algorithm would be a useful indicator of good search results?

"Page and Brin noticed that BackRub's results were superior to those from existing search engines like AltaVista and Excite, which often returned irrelevant listings. 'They were looking only at text and not considering this other signal' Page recalls. That signal is now better known as PageRank. To test whether it worked well in a search application, Brin and Page hacked together a BackRub search tool. It searched only the words in page titles and applied PageRank to sort the results by relevance, but its results were so far superior to the usual search engines - which ranked mostly on keywords - that Page and Brin knew they were onto something big." -- John Battelle

In other words, like all good scientists, Page and Brin knew PageRank would be great after they ran the experiment, saw the results, and saw how exceptional they were.

So as well as a fascinating story, there's a marvellous moral in the genesis of Google.
It's not enough to have a great idea.
You need to build it.
You need to prove it.

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A crowd of precious individuals

Twenty-three and a half years ago.
My goodness. I was just a naive teenager.
Dad was listening to the game on the radio. He called upstairs, to tell me "something's happened".
I shooed him away. I wanted to watch the game on Match of the Day later that night without knowing the score.
How antiquated that time seems now, a bygone age.
Soon after, he told me the game had been abandoned.
Hours later, on the evening news, I learnt that over 50 fans had died.

I remember the bewilderment. 50 dead? What? How?
It was only a football match.
By Monday over 90 were listed dead, and through the shock the slander started.
Bloody hooligans! No tickets! They rushed the gates! Drunken scum!
I remembered Heysel; and to my eternal regret, my sorrow was poisoned with shame.
Months later, watching a television documentary, I learned what really happened.
How 95 people could die at a football match. Horribly, as it turns out.
And I wept.

The more I learnt, the more I raged at the inhumanity of the police.
How they saw us as a problem to be managed, not citizens to safeguard.
How they saw football fans, their fellow countrymen, as a chaotic mob.
As a rabble to be caged, rather than thousands of fragile, precious individuals.

Individually, we are so small. We trust the law will give us justice.
But our system of justice was rotten.
Granting impunity to the incompetent, whilst treating the victims with contempt.
A slander, an injustice, that has persisted for 23 years.

Today - at last - an independent commission published its long awaited report, finally nailing the wretched lies and revealing the truth.

The commission reported that in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, the South Yorkshire police and emergency services made 'strenuous attempts' to deflect blame for the crush onto the victims. That the police took blood from every victim, including children, testing for the presence of alcohol in an attempt to 'impugn their reputations'. That 116 of 164 police statements were 'amended to remove or alter comments unfavourable to South Yorkshire police'. When the prime minister announced this in parliament, the chamber collectively gasped.

Put simply, not only have hundreds of families suffered the loss of a loved one, but they've been victims of an institutionalised cover-up. Remember those who died were not part of a reckless mob, they were ordinary folk just like you and me. And they walked unwittingly to their deaths. Yet those in authority decided their own reputations were worth far more than the truth, a truth that might help bring some closure to the grieving, a truth that one day, might save your life.

The truth matters because the truth keeps us safe.

Before Hillsborough, I'd experienced standing in heaving crowds, in shitty football grounds, being lifted and carried by ominous waves of surging people. Looking back, those memories make me shiver.

Crush disasters don't happen because of drunken crowds, or ticket-less fans trying to sneak in for free. They happen because crowds are poorly managed, when those in authority forget their fundamental duty of care, and start treating individuals like ball bearings, to be pushed down pipes.

Brian Reade memorably wrote of the 96: "Never forget that for English football's bright tomorrow, they gave their todays".

Never forget their sacrifice; the lessons bought with their blood keep you safe when you join a throng of thousands on the way to match or a concert, or stand in a crowd 10-deep on a packed subterranean tube platform.

From today, the truth can be told: that on April 15th, 1989, a crowd of precious individuals gathered to watch a football match, that their custodians failed them utterly, and then besmirched and blamed them, and perpetuated a disgraceful lie that has lasted for 23 years.

And understanding why is more than putting the record straight, it's about the kind of society we want to live in, one where the powerful protect the weak, and there's truth and justice for all.

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Lean Football

What's the connection between a football club and a lean startup?

Rafa Benitez recently talked about being a data-driven football manager, which I found very interesting, because what Rafa was describing sounded a lot like the Build - Measure - Learn loop employed by lean startups.

In the business world, this process is popular with startups because they're attempting to make decisions in environments of considerable uncertainty. They don't know how good their product is, or even if anyone will buy it. So they need to test their assumptions, and they need to incorporate what they learn into the next version of their product.

The lean startup idea is about getting away from the 'Great Man' theory of leadership - that good decisions are informed, not opinionated, and driven by data rather than ego. This is scientific decision-making: you run experiments, you test your hypothesises, because nature can not be fooled. Remember, lean is not a synonym for quick and cheap, lean is a synonym for quick and experimentally proved.

Sport is a very different kind of experiment, a test where you get the examination first, and the lessons afterwards - as the baseball pitcher Vernon Law put it.

Though just like in the business world, in the football world is dominated by 'Great Men' - patriarchs with decades of success behind them - who reign autocratically over the biggest clubs. The natural order of things seems to be Great Men rule Great Clubs with Great Transfer Budgets funded by Great Plutocrats (or Great Debt). Which made me wonder whether the Reign of the Great Men was inevitable and eternal, or whether the football world might ever witness the the kind of disruption the technology world has seen.

So I began to think about where lean principles have been applied to football. Looking back, was Rafa attempting to implement a lean approach when he was in charge of Liverpool? At the time, I remember Rafa being mocked for his insistence on "facts" and "qualitee" - and derided as being a cold, passionless strategist. Then again, we'd expect an approach based on objectivity to be much better at answering "how do I get the best out of each of my players?" than answering "how do I win matches in the most eye-pleasingly way possible?"

One form of evidence-based decision-making that has definitely been applied to sport is sabermetrics, currently in vogue having been popularised by the book and film Moneyball. Originally conceived in baseball, it seeks to find under-valued players by using stats to quantify talent. Whilst this can work well in baseball, which is effectively a series of one-on-one set pieces, it is more challenging in football, which is a much more dynamic team game.

In baseball, batting is easy to score, the striker either hits it or doesn’t. In football, a striker might score lots of goals, but understanding why is more complicated. Perhaps they play with several creative players, perhaps their style of play exploits weaker defenders, perhaps the manager has made playing football fun, or he's tailored the team's approach to suit their star man.

This makes it difficult to identify a talented, but under-valued, footballer through stats alone - because much of what makes a player exceptional isn’t actually evident in stats. This is why scouts repeatedly go to watch players in person, and why understanding a player’s personality is so important. A great team can make an average player look exceptional. Scouts attempt to assess a player’s natural talent.

The problem is that the evidence used in moneyball decision-making has been collected from the player's past. A player that has proved his worth in one team will not necessarily transfer that success to his new team. The lean strategy would be to identify lots of cheap prospects, put them into your team, and test them. If they work, great! - if not, that's a shame, we move on.

The sorry tale of Andy Carroll and Stewart Downing provides a chastening lesson on basing your decisions on stats. In January 2011, Liverpool's then director of football, Damien Comolli, was tasked with quickly identifying a successor to the outgoing Fernando Torres. His eyes settled on Andy Carroll, a tall, strong Englishman then in great form for a resurgent Newcastle.

After an inauspicious start to his Liverpool career, it was clear Carroll wasn't getting the service that allowed him to thrive at Newcastle. So what about that Downing fella - he's a winger, and he's created more chances than any other player in the Premiership last season. Sign him, he creates chances, Carroll scores the goals, we win games. Too easy!

Now if your prospect is rated at £20 million pounds, and the stats say he’s one of the best in the country, the logic of moneyball is to say: no, don't do it - he’s too expensive. Forget the English Premium, we’ll look for someone similar here or abroad, after all there’s a lot of people playing football worldwide - as Arsene Wegner continues to demonstrate masterfully.

A £20m purchase also goes against the principles of the lean strategy, because you can’t afford the experiment to fail. As it happened, during the 2011-12 season, the experiment did fail: Carroll and Downing performed poorly, and there was no plan B. With our football having no direction, our Director of Football departed.

Yet one team that did use the moneyball approach shrewdly was Newcastle United, who quietly bought talented - but unheralded - players from the European leagues. Without a benevolent plutocrat to back them, Newcastle are forced to operate like any normal business, buy cheaply, add value, enjoy its advantages, and use profits on sales to fund growth.

In the coming years, as UEFA introduces its long-overdue Financial Fair Play regulations I hope the long-forgotten art of running a football club like a business will be revived. Just as in any business, once dominant giants are inevitably overtaken by upstarts. Historic clubs like Liverpool, Everton and Arsenal must now strive to compete against the expensively renovated plutocrat project clubs like Man City and Chelsea - and not forgetting Man Utd, who've dominated the last two decades through their commercial savvy and an exceptional ability to nurture talent.

New kit; means business

As we Liverpool fans look back on a season of considerable disappointment, with the league won by one billionaire-backed club, and the Champions League final being contested by another, what next?

When we sing "They say are days are numbered, we're not famous anymore" we celebrate that we went from being a laughing stock to the best team in Europe in the space of a few years. Like 1999 and 2004, we must rebuild again, and we are missing more than just a piece from the jigsaw.

It was very sad to see King Kenny go, but in attributing our dismal last league campaign to bad luck he revealed he didn't properly understand what was going wrong, or how to put it right. Read through this excellent discussion of our lack of on-field intelligence, for example, and then tell me if you still believe in the power of bad luck.

Clive Woodward's "Thanks, you just cost us the World Cup" approach sounds harsh, but it needs to be said. Just as in business, mistakes need to be called, in order to be understood. Players need to understand why they're making mistakes before they can hope to correct them. Zen temple. Battlefield. Football field. The path to mastery is the same.

King Kenny had natural talent and intelligence in abundance, together they made him our greatest ever player. But he was unable to teach his football intelligence to others, perhaps he expected his men to intuitively understand the game, like he did. Whereas Rafa Benitez believed in data, he would scour videos for hours, so he could tell Torres where he should be in the box.

Like a man in charge of an ailing family business, Kenny managed by instinct, by sentiment. I believe we need a different kind of manager, a data-driven manager, who believes in making his own luck. Someone with fresh ideas, who can coach our players into better individuals, and collectively fashion them into a superior team. A startup manager.

Liverpool must become an upstart club again. 
One that's young, agile, innovative and fearless.

For Liverpool fans, 2005 to 2009 now seems like a glorious age of over-achievement.
Like many startups, Rafa's Liverpool FC enjoyed a meteoric rise and sudden fall.

But as Beckett said:
"Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

Vive le sport.

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How to give a meaningful gift

Giving someone a meaningful gift is difficult.
We want the gift to say what we feel:
“I love you!”
  “Your life is so adventurous!”
    “You’re gorgeous!”
      “I treasure your friendship!”
        “You’re unique!”
But our gift can not talk.
So we buy something expensive and hope it conveys the right messages.
Or, we just convert our love into money, and send a gift voucher.

Why is giving a meaningful gift so difficult?
How did we end up expressing our love through money?
Why do we try to send messages through objects rather than expressing how we feel?
Are our words really that worthless?
After all, what could be nicer than accidentally overhearing someone say something lovely about you?

Everyone wants to be appreciated, and secretly, we covet praise. It makes us feel good. It reinforces our social bonds, it makes us feel accepted, part of the tribe. Without it, we feel ostracised, rejected, and lonely.

We've even invented a medium to convey our appreciation - the greetings card. So why is a humble handwritten card not the most treasured gift one can receive? We do we spend so lavishly on products to demonstrate our affection?

Alas, senders of greetings cards rarely open their hearts to express how they really feel. Instead they quickly scribble what they believe they’re expected to write; like a safe message wishing the recipient a lovely birthday, that they’re thinking about them, and they love them lots. What goes unsaid is why they love them, what makes them so unique, and why they absolutely treasure the time they share together.

Tell those close to you how you feel, before it's too late! Friends can drift apart, family members can move far away, and sudden tragedies can silence any one of us. What record will there be of the journey you shared? Do not save your feelings for a memorial. Tell them now.

And what power words have.

A couple of years ago, a friend was feeling down, so we contacted her friends and asked them: what is it about her you love so much? And they told us: scores of beautiful messages, heartfelt words, and quirky in-jokes. It gave us goosebumps. We married each comment to an image, and made them into a hardback book. When we gave her the book, she read it, then she smiled, and then she cried. She hadn’t realised how much she was loved. Few of us do.

Her friends loved it too, we’d provided an opportunity to truly tell her how much she meant to them. It was as if we’d given them all permission to say something heartfelt. Our creation had brought joy to our small world of friends, and it felt awesome. 

Producing this first book was tremendously time-consuming, unexpectedly hard work, but as Paul Graham says, at the heart of every good venture is a schlep - a tedious task you believe you can do better. Still, we sat on the idea for a year, thinking someone should do something.
The realisation dawned slowly; gift giving was broken, and we had an opportunity to fix it.
We imagined a social gift, where feelgood messages of appreciation didn’t just accompany the gift, they were the gift.

And so we created gleambook.

The idea was to bring friends together to create unique, heartfelt gifts. Now all you need to do is say something nice, and invite your friends to do the same, and we take care of the hard work. From the collected comments we design and produce a truly unique work of art, a physical artifact, a book full of pages that look like this:

And you get to see your loved one gleam.

How much better it is, to give the gift of feeling good.

Come and say hello at gleambook.
We’d love to hear from you.

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The Lean Startup Montage

“The best way to have a good idea, is to have lots of ideas” -- Linus Pauling

But how do you prove an idea?

Last week, I went to listen to Eric Ries talk about lean startups to a packed Mermaid Theatre, (a great event, thanks BLN). He began by asking the audience if anyone had ever seen a movie about a startup; all hands up, for sure, we’d all seen “The Social Network”. But - says Eric - don’t forget that other truly great startup movie: Ghostbusters. Then he asked: what do both films have in common?

Both films have the same structure: introduce the characters, show the struggles of the nascent business as they count down to their last dollar, before finally hitting the big time and connecting up/saving the world. And somewhere in between comes the bit where the company actually gets built, but that’s not as interesting, so it gets condensed into a montage with a catchy soundtrack.

Of course, in a startup, the building bit is the difficult bit, and product design meetings make poor cinema. But products shouldn’t take so long to build that they have to be squeezed into a montage. In a nutshell, the lean startup approach urges entrepreneurs to get a minimum viable product out as quickly as possible, rather than worrying about perfecting it. Then once in customers’ hands, the product can be scientifically tested and tweaked to fit the market’s demands.

Steve Blank defines a startup as: “a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model”.

In other words, startups attempt to monetise opportunities, rather than exploit certainties.

It is this extreme uncertainty that makes the scientific method of forming hypotheses, collecting data and testing your assumptions so useful to early stage startups. If you’re being innovative, or seeking to win a new market niche, there’s no blueprint, no-one to imitate, and no guarantees anyone even wants your product. You’ve got to run the experiment.

And the key word here is experiment. The lean startup approach is encapsulated in 3 words: Build. Measure. Learn.

Build means launching as early and cheaply as possible. Using an agile approach to code and deploy quickly, using open source to avoid reinventing the wheel, and the Cloud to minimise capex. Scaling is done just-in-time, as it’s needed; there’s no sense delaying your launch until you’re convinced you can support thousands of users when you don’t know if you’ll attract ANY users.

Measure means determining what users think about your product. The data is collected by tools like real-time analytics, split testing and surveys - the principle here being: better to have bad news that's true, than good news that you’ve just made up.

Learn means deriving insights from what you’ve measured - to better understand your product’s performance and the needs of your market. This will generate new ideas to tune your startup’s engine to perform even better.

If you're building the wrong product, there are no possible optimisations. But better to discover that now, rather than 5 man-years into development.

This field-testing seeks to avoid wasting time solving a problem that no-one is having, or a technical solution that just doesn't work, or a product that users don't like. The insights you derive can help distinguish between user indifference and disapproval, and allow you to adjust your approach accordingly.

The lean startup philosophy is about testing and continual improvement, with decisions based on solid data rather than the whims and egos of entrepreneurs. It’s about realising an idea, but not being so wedded to it that you can’t improvise and adapt it into something even better.

As Pablo Picasso once said: “You have to have an idea of what you’re going to do, but it should be a vague idea...”

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The Planet of the Landlords

"Forty years ago, wealthy Americans financed the U.S. government mainly through their tax payments. Today wealthy Americans finance the government mainly by lending it money." -- Robert Reich

The wealthy have engineered a very cosy arrangement for themselves. Instead of giving their money away, they lend it to their governments - by buying bonds and securities - and so get paid interest instead of being taxed. Sociologists call it the Matthew Effect: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It comes from 'The parable of the talents" - an exhortation not to waste valuable capital. It seems that Jesus was an closet entrepreneur, as well as a social revolutionary.

But isn't it weird that the radical generation that grew up in the 60's wanting the change the world, now presides over a world where power and privilege is just as concentrated as it's ever been?

This week I watched Adam Curtis' excellent new documentary: All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, which sets out to explore how the elite use their power in the information age. The task of explaining Why Things Are The Way Things Are is far too complicated and subjective to be explained in an hour long documentary, but Curtis' documentaries are like core samples, taking an issue - in this case the rise of individualism - and exploring its origins and ramifications.

This introduced the curious character of Ayn Rand, her Big Idea was the triumph of individualism, she believed that Man was stifled by government, and that altruism was a weakness that limited Man's ambitions. Her vision of society was a big Darwinian competition where the creatives, the innovators and the entrepreneurs would perform mighty deeds, reshaping the world through the sheer force of their Nietzschean will, unencumbered by the petty restrictions of bureaucrats and the sneering of critics. After all, who's ever built a statue to a critic?

This sounds a bit like the philosophy of Just Fucking Do It, which is especially popular amongst entrepreneurs, but Rand's message is more insidious - that the success of the elite is due to their own inner brilliance. We are just better than the masses, they say. We are Supermen. The Masters of the Universe.

When you start thinking like that, you have no social debt to repay. No one helped you get to the top. Altruism is just shackles. Why should you pay taxes to the lazy and the feckless?
You forget wealth comes from millions of pairs of hands. Not just your genius. But you jealously guard your riches. You stash them offshore. Government is just another mendicant, looking to shake you down. If they want your money, you'll expect a return. So you lend it to them.

In the late 90s, many Americans thought their Randian Übermensch-ness was responsible for the long boom of the New Economy. But the dirty little secret was that US productivity was flat. The wealth they thought they were creating was actually debt. Countries like China were doing the work, the Americans were borrowing to pay for it, and the Chinese and wealthy individuals were lending the money to them.

Not that this was China's fault, they were just trying to get a fair deal for their vast population's hard work. Chrystia Freeland recounts a CEO talking about the transformation of the world economy: "If it lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade”.

So whilst China created wealth, financiers created an elaborate Ponzi scheme of investment, and everybody got to feel good about the new economic miracle.

Of course, the values of investments can go down, as well as up. Fortunately for the wealthy, they wrote the rules of the game, and the selfishness of the rules would make Ayn Rand proud. The game is played like this:

• The wealthy obtain access to cheap money
• They use it to fuel a boom (property, shares)
• They rake in the profits of the boom
• The bubble eventually bursts
• The wealthy evacuate their money
• The bondholders are bailed out (in the name of preserving economic stability)
• The debt gets loaded onto the citizens of the unfortunate countries, who are made poorer for years to come
• The wealthy move on and find another mark(et)

It seems a financial crisis is only a crisis if you get stuck with the bill. Like the citizens of Ireland and Greece are currently discovering, the wealthy have already left the restaurant.

Yesterday, Gil Scott-Heron died. His classic poem "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" was written 40 years ago, and captured the era's spirit of discontent. The children of that era are grown up now, and the world they fashioned is more tolerant, but also more selfish.

40 years ago, men were walking on the moon, put there by the combined effort of 400,000 people. Apollo's collective grand adventure is history, replaced by internet-empowered individuals steered by their own rational self-interest. Powered by technology, what each of us can achieve alone, with just one pair of hands, has never been greater. I hope we use that power constructively, to build - not exploit.

I'd rather live on a planet of artisans than a planet of landlords.

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One Night in Dortmund

"And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
[of that night in Dortmund when we won the treble]"
-- Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 4

Hard to believe it was 10 years ago today.
Let me take you back to a humid spring night in Germany...

The 2001 UEFA Cup Final was the sort of game that defines the phrase "you had to be there". A sensational game of footy, in a magnificent stadium, in wonderfully friendly environment, with a glorious, historic result.

We arrived in Dortmund at 2pm, and took the train into town to find the Altemarkt, the old square where the fans' party was taking place. Unfortunately this coincided with a downpour of biblical proportions, the sort of storm that Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote songs about.

But perhaps this was a blessing in disguise. Dashing for cover we found a café, giving us the opportunity to sample the regional food and drink and mingle with some of the travelling Basque supporters: a very pleasant bunch who responded to Liverpool songs in good humour with chants of their own. In fact the atmosphere was so friendly that the two sets of supporters were soon swapping scarves, flags and shirts.

A few mobile phone calls later and some fellow fans we knew had been summoned to the venue. By then the downpour had stopped and the sun was shining. So we began walking south towards the stadium, stopping halfway at a local pub to soak up some more atmosphere (and liquid refreshment). Here the canon of Reds' songs was recited for the benefit of the locals present, I'm not sure how much they understood, but they cheered along with us all the same.

Then off the stadium itself, and the crowd swelled to the size that could sustain a rendition of 'Scouser Tommy'. One underpass was used to good effect, with a standing chant of 'Gérard, Gérard Houllier' continued by those entering it. Meanwhile the police kept a discreet presence, treating the fans as guests rather than cattle and contributing to the good-natured atmosphere. We laid to rest the ghost of Heysel in Dortmund.

Getting into the ground was the only point where our hosts' legendary efficiency broke down. There weren't enough stewards at the gates so the crowd built up faster than it could be admitted. But once inside we could appreciate the Westfalenstadion in all its glory.

The Westfalenstadion is a marvel. Four huge cantilever stands giving all 65000 seats unobstructed views. Superb acoustics and no running track meant songs from one stand easily reached the opposite end of the stadium, generating a superb enveloping atmosphere. As the teams ran out you could tell the stage was set for something memorable.

The pre-match huddle that epitomises the new Liverpool spirit was greeted with a deafening roar that set the tone for the night. The team responded, and from kickoff we went for the throat. 3 minutes later we're already in dreamland as Babbel nods Macca's perfect free kick home. Yes!

Playing as if we had a point to prove to the Cruyff family we continued to attack their nervous 3 man defence. The second goal was a beauty of quick passing, Hamann to Owen, perfect pass, Gerrard scores. Get in! Needless to say we're now going bananas, this start is beyond our wildest dreams.

Before the game Kev Howson predicted we Reds would give the Alavés supporters the respect they deserved, and he was right, instead of the jibes like "2-0 in your cup final", so beloved by the Mancs, we celebrated by singing the manager's praises. "Who let the Reds out?", "Are you Shankly in disguise?", "Gérard, Gérard Houllier..."

With the party atmosphere in full swing we began to start thinking of achieving the treble with a 4 or 5-nil scoreline. As did a few of our players it seemed, tackles were missed, men weren't closed down, and out of nothing a cross is headed into the goal below us. Bugger.

Come on you Reds! The inspirational mood returns and the team dominates the rest of the half. Hamann (again) plays in Owen who's tripped by the keeper as he rounds him. As clear a penalty as night follows day, 40000 voices chant "Off Off Off!", but ref only books him. Macca takes the kick, never ever doubt, 3-1. And the party atmosphere is back!

At half-time there was a guest appearance from Anfield announcer George encouraging us to keep the noise up. We did our best, but Alavés were even more fired up, back on the pitch 5 minutes before kickoff. And they started the half on fire, catching us completely cold. 1 minute in and Carra is torn to bits by the impressive Contra, deep cross - Moreno scores.
Oh bollocks.

We're still licking our mental wounds when the ref awards a series of debatable free-kicks. Moreno shoots low and we see the net at the far end bulging. We can't believe it, and the Alavés fans at that end go absolutely mental. 3-3. Oh shit.

For the next few minutes we Reds sat stunned and subdued. For all I know the Alavés supporters could have been singing "Shall we sing a song for you?" in Basque. Whatever, they were making all the noise now.

Probably feeling that the best form of defence is attack, Ged hauls off Henchoz and puts Vlad on. Given our defence is having a collective 'mare it's a huge gamble, but SuperSteve moves to right-back and the ship is steadied. And we Reds find our voices again.

The game is really open now, Heskey has had a few chances but hasn't taken them, so there's a huge cheer when we see God about to come on. His appearance whips the Reds support back into a fervour, and we begin to start playing like we did in the first half.

Then the best move of the night, a patient build up releases God into the box, he feints, runs on and places a shot inside the far post. And the ground explodes into a deafening din. No words, just cheering, hugs, yells at the clouds and fists in the air. Already a classic match, it's now become a footballing fairytale. Unbelievable.

Now the Alavés fans are stunned to near-silence, but we still don't look comfortable, so Ged replaces Owen with Berger. But Alavés keep on coming, their fans roar them on, and we're now hanging on. A striker breaks into our box and falls over, luckily the ref sees through that one and he's booked.

We breathe again. Come on Reds, let's not do an Arsenal.

A few minutes left, we're trying to sing YNWA but the Alavés pressure throttles it. Sander saves us twice but the price is a last minute corner. This time Sander is beaten to the ball and it's in. Since we've been standing urging the lads on to one last effort, it's almost a reflex reaction when we slump to our seats with our heads in our hands.

4-4. And it's Jordi bloody Cruyff. Oh fuck.

The elation that followed Robbie's masterstroke now wears off and notice I'm hoarse from shouting and my hands are aching from clapping. In fact I hurt all over, talk about your dreams being tossed and blown. I half expect Alavés to score a winner in injury time but it never comes.

Then an announcement comes over the tannoy: Golden Goal rule.

Sighs of agony, the realisation extra time will be torture to watch. But we channel our energies into motivating the team, and as extra time starts we've found our voices again. "Oh when the Reds..."

The chant almost chokes in our throats as Alavés run through us almost from the kickoff. We clear, then Berger almost does the same. By now the tension and noise are incredible, when we attack the Alavés support whistle for all they're worth, it's like hearing a jumbo jet take off. In return we respond to their attacks with roars.

But with Alavés a striker down we begin to dominate. Our back line is now just Sami and Jamie whilst Markus and Steve push forward. Death or glory!

It's end to end stuff, but too often we only had God up front. Time ticks away, but we're still urging our heroes on, with speech now painful our encouragement is more often in form of claps and roars.

Then a clever Vlad spin fools his marker, who's booked again and sent off. It's Karmona their captain and defensive rock, Alavés now have 9 men and there's 4 minutes left. There's a buzz of expectation as Sami jogs into the box, we're on our feet again, expecting a Macca free kick special onto SuperSami's forehead.

In it comes, and from 100 metres away we see the net bulging.

A split-second of disbelief and then absolute delirium breaks out. Joy magnified by relief multiplied by the glory of what we've achieved. Even that doesn't do the experience justice.

Soon after we saw on the replay it was an own goal, but we couldn't have cheered it any louder if it had been a bullet header from Robbie himself.

The celebrations involved pretty much every song we know, spine-tingling renditions of YNWA, praise for Houllier, the team, the club. It only stopped when our opponents went to collect their medals, when we joined their fans in singing "Alavés, Alavés, Alavés" as loud as we could. We wanted to make sure they knew how much we respected their achievement, it was a wonderful moment.


Then our turn, Robbie and Sami lift the cup, and we're in ecstasy. The team assembles in front of the North stand, YNWA starts on the tannoy and everybody, players, management and fans sing it together. You treasure memories like that forever.

We've just won the treble, 5-4, in a match they'll talk about for decades.

4th place for the Champions League?
In Dortmund I witnessed what glory really is.

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